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FT. MEADE, Md. -- Bradley Manning, the Army private convicted of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks, was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison today.

Pfc. Manning will also be reduced in rank to private, forfeit all pay and allowances and receive a dishonorable discharge. He will serve his prison sentence at the military's detention facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Manning, 25, expressed no emotion as a military judge announced the sentence. His defense attorney, David Coombs, later called Manning a "resilient young man" who comforted the weeping members of his defense team after the sentencing.

"You get this guy and he looks to me and he says, "It's OK. It's all right. Don't worry about it. I know you did your best. It's going to be OK. I'm going to be OK. I'm going to get through this,'" he said.

During his trial, Manning’s defense team suggested his struggles with gender identity as a gay soldier were a factor in his decision to leak. His attorneys presented an email to a former supervisor from April 2010 in which he said he was transgender and joined the Army to “get rid of it.” The email, which had the subject line “My Problem,” also included a photo of Manning in which he is wearing a blonde wig and lipstick. During Manning’s nine-month detainment at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., following his arrest in 2010, he sent two letters to his counselor using the name “Breanna,’’ Master Sgt. Craig Blenis testified at his trial.

"The stress that he was under was mostly to give context to what was going on at the time," Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Thursday. "It was never an excuse because that's not what drove his actions. What drove his actions was a strong moral compass."